Drug war critics take in state of Santa Cruz pot scene

City University of New York professor Harry Levine, left, and USCS professor Craig Reinarman, right, tour the KindPeoples Collective in Soquel. The two are frequent collaborators on books and articles about U.S. drug policy.

SANTA CRUZ &GT;&GT; Buzzing through Santa Cruz last week, two critics of the drug war got a look at its discontents.

UC Santa Cruz professor Craig Reinarman and City University of New York professor Harry Levine are frequent collaborators. Together they wrote "Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice" — a takedown of years of U.S. drug sentencing policy that Attorney General Eric Holder, faced with crowded prisons, is now trying to unravel — and when you joke that they are finally prevailing in their arguments, they laugh like old friends.

"In 2006 or seven, (Supreme Court Justice) Antonin Scalia finally agreed with things we had said in 1986," Levine said. "It was a no-holds-barred, well-documented, serious book that said how horrific the war on drugs was, by and large, on black and poor Latin communities."

They have since turned their attention to pot. A local, Reinarman is familiar with California's medical marijuana industry, even testifying at the Board of Supervisors about county regulations. His research looks at drug policies through a prism of social control, and he lives in a place where those policies are evolving rapidly.

Levine said he sees the world through the same lens, but lives in a state only now toeing the waters of pot policy changes. But he had never even seen the inside of a dispensary, and took the invitation last week to get a tour of the local pot industry and the fruits of Prop. 215, California's 18-year pot experiment and the first statewide broadside on federal drug policy.

Tall, thin and enthusiastic, Reinarman's Drugs and Society course is a staple for many UCSC undergrads. Levine got his doctorate at UC Berkeley but comes across as a Buddha-shaped New York intellectual, down to the eyeglasses balanced on top of his graying head.

With the myths of the crack epidemic tamed, Levine has begun turning his attention to low-level marijuana arrests, critiquing them as racially skewed, a risk-free way for police to justify grants and accrue overtime pay that leaves the arrestee with a criminal record and lifetime of consequences.

"I decided somebody needed to be the worlds' expert on low-level marijuana arrests, possession arrests," Levine said. "So I volunteered for the job, and it worked, and I became that."

With strong institutional reasons for police to keep busting pot smokers, a remarkable thing happened in New York City — low-level marijuana cases became the leading cause of arrest, Levine's research showed.

"And that's not just true for New York. It's likely true for any other major city in America," Levine said.

Levine offers that Santa Cruz County has one of California's highest per capita arrest rates for minor pot possession, and Reinarman chimes in that it shares unenviable traits with other jurisdictions.

"One percent of Santa Cruz is black. But 5 percent of the marijuana arrests are black. It's tiny in terms of absolute numbers, but the same racial disproportion holds even in Santa Cruz," Reinarman said.

The two were escorted on their tour by local attorney Ben Rice, counsel to many local pot clubs. They visited a marijuana laboratory, as well as a new dispensary that is more of an upscale club to California's usual marijuana juke joints.

SC Labs, one of the state's first pot testing endeavors, recently moved to the Harvey West area from cramped quarters in Capitola. There are no requirements in California to test pot but demand for their services is skyrocketing, as is the number of competitors.

But SC Labs is the biggest, bolstered by a marketing partnership with Weedmaps — a go-to pot club locator — and customer demand for increased sophistication about pesticides, potency and other qualities. If you've ever heard a winemaker's discursive prose, that is how executives at SC Labs talk about pot, and they hand that knowledge out for a fee.

At KindPeoples Collective, patients pass through a metal detector into a high-ceilinged converted motorcycle repair shop to find computerized membership kiosks, a seed bank and "budtenders" ready to advise clients.

Psychadelic art is on sale, with prices running into the hundreds of dollars. Dozens of marijuana samples are displayed under acrylic, on a counter that sits below two high-definition televisions streaming animal documentaries. A sound system cranks out Pearl Jam and the Dave Matthews Band.

The proprietors are two young entrepreneurs who show Levine and Reinarman the ropes of the modern California dispensary. Khalil Moutawakkil and Graham Edwards roll out different forms of cannabis — down to a Binaca-like spray — while demonstrating an encyclopedic argument for pot's medical benefits.

The two believe, earnestly, that the tide is shifting, that they are part of the change, and that the change has profound implications for people's suffering. They look forward to a day when the prohibition against pot is dropped altogether.

"It's so much fun. I thought a lot of people that I know that are older than me would maybe say, 'watch it' and "be careful' and this and that, but everyone's like, 'Hey man, we're proud of you.' It's really great," Moutawakkil said.

It's also clear that a significant amount of money was invested in elevating KindPeoples a notch or three above the typical pot dispensary, where the d?cor tends toward threadbare. The capitalist ethic is another sign of change. So is its location across the street from the county's Public Safety Center.

In fact, those signs are everywhere. The county regulations themselves are step toward official acknowledgement. The fact that a lawyer, two academics and a journalist spent a Friday afternoon peering over strains of Blue Dream, Blackberry Kush and Skywalker OG also means something. So did the lab technician, wearing moccasins and a white lab coat, carrying cannabis samples past a board room.

And so two messengers of drug war folly saw what a future without one might look like.